


The Last Place I Looked (it’s where I found you)

by Linpatootie



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: I am not a scientist so ignore the glaring errors I surely made, It's pretty fluffy, M/M, Polyamory, ZellerPrice, some graphic description of crime scenes but nothing a Hannibal viewer can't handle, there's also more banter than anyone has ever needed in their lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2013-07-05
Packaged: 2017-12-16 11:45:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/861626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linpatootie/pseuds/Linpatootie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brian Zeller's life is weird enough as it is, what with human totem poles and shit like that. He doesn't really know why he felt the need to further complicate things by having an affair with Jimmy effin' Price.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Brian Zeller really hates his life, on occasion. He supposes people wouldn’t expect him to, what with him being such a joy to be around and all, but there you have it. He spends his days watching Will Graham’s personality disorder hop across perfectly undisturbed crime scenes like a socially stunted little baby deer, then stares at the most creatively butchered corpses for hours trying to work out what the hell happened to them, and inevitably has to watch that same Aspie twerp make some weird-ass inexplicable leap and solve the damn thing.

It’s not that he wants the glory, or nothing. It’s just that it’s all so _weird_. The little creeper sits in his morgue channelling the serial killer of the week while some poor schmuck lies disembowelled on his table and they all have to act like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

“We should just close up shop. Let Graham imagine his way into solving murders and the three of us can go do something else with our lives.”

He’s sprawled dramatically across his desk chair, his legs spread, arms dangling to floor, head thrown back across the backrest. The chair itself he’s parked, even more dramatically, smack dab in the middle of the lab while he waits for his blood centrifuge to stop spinning.

“Like what?” Beverly drawls, jotting down numbers on her note pad.  
“I dunno. Open a bar?”  
“Oh yes. We could call it the Quantico Murder Club,” Jimmy says, giving Brian’s chair a shove as he walks past.  
“I mix a mean Screwdriver,” Brian adds.

“You two go do that. I’m gonna go see Will, I want to talk to him about the stuff we found under the guy’s fingernails.” And Beverly’s gone. Brian watches her – he hates to see her go but damn does he love to watch her leave – and spins his chair around to face Jimmy.  
“Come on. How much do our jobs suck.”

“Excuse you, I just spent the better portion of an hour filtering through this guy’s stomach contents. I am living the dream, thank you very much.”  
“Who gives a shit, Jimmy? What’s his stomach contents going to matter? The killer removed his brains and replaced them with his intestines. Gee whiz, I wonder what the cause of death was!”  
“I care about his stomach content.”  
“Intestines inside his skull, Jimmy. Intestines.”

Jimmy just sort of shrugs, plops down on his chair and sighs. “I’m hungry. Want to go get some lunch?”  
Brian understands. Examining a guy’s stomach contents does that to a man. They pop just around the corner where there’s this shitty bagel place and Jimmy gets this thing with salmon and some other stuff on it. Brian contents himself with a blueberry muffin and wonders what the hell Beverly sees in Will Graham that he’s apparently missing.

“So what do you think the killer was trying to say,” Jimmy muses over his bagel. “With the guts in the skull and all?”  
“Ask Graham. I’m sure he can tell us all about the deeper meaning of that.”  
“Good thing you’re not bitter or anything.”  
“One of these days we’re all going to be standing around a dead body, and Will Graham will be the one who put it there.”

Jimmy raises an eyebrow at him, bagel still raised halfway to his mouth. “Gosh Brian, your geek is showing, with you quoting British TV like that. If you start making sly references to Dr. Who I might have to leave my wife and elope with you.”  
“I don’t like sci fi,” Brian mutters, peering out the window. “But you know what I mean.”

Jimmy sighs. “If you’re saying that Will Graham is gonna go snap and murder a bunch of people, I don’t. Weirdo doesn’t equal murderous lunatic. Did you know he has like twenty dogs, or something?”  
“Twenty.”  
“Or something.”

Brian stares out the window and pictures Will Graham walking twenty Corgis while Jimmy finishes his bagel and burns his tongue on his coffee. He swears like a sailor across the table and Brian thinks he’s never been this bored in his life.  
“The real question though,” Jimmy says once he’s done wishing several sorts of venereal disease on his latte, “Is what the killer did with the brain. He didn’t play switcharoo and leave it in the abdominal cavity, after all.”

“Maybe he’s making Magaj.”  
“Ma-what?”  
“Magaj. It’s an Indian dish. Brains with gravy.”  
Jimmy makes a face much like the one he made when the first slurp of scalding coffee connected with his tongue, and Brian laughs.

***

Fucking Will Graham solves the fucking case with his magic fucking imagination and Brian goes home late after rounding off his autopsy report. He makes grilled cheese and sits and watches Mythbusters for a couple hours, feeling dissatisfied and cranky. He goes to sleep too late, wakes up too early, and doesn’t feel like hanging around his apartment so he sits in the lab waiting for Jimmy and Bev to arrive for almost an hour.

***

“I just want a normal case. A normal murder we can solve with normal investigative work,” he says over the limbless torso on his autopsy table.  
“There’s no such thing as a normal murder, and stop pouting at the corpse,” Bev says, snapping on her latex gloves.  
“There’s certainly more normal than this.” He gestures theatrically across the table.  
“Ninety four pounds!” Jimmy exclaims. “Without the arms and legs, of course.”

“So about 195 to 200 pounds with,” Brian says, doing the kind of fast math in his head he thinks someone ought to compliment him for.  
“And around six feet tall. Think we’ll find the arms and legs back?” Bev says.  
“On a totem somewhere, probably,” Brian says, flicking his protective glasses onto his face with stubborn resignation.

The autopsy is brief and initially inconclusive. Having one’s limbs removed, while surely unpleasant, isn’t necessarily lethal and they can’t immediately find the cause of death. Not until the computer spits out the results for the blood tests Brian ran and shows surreal amounts of arsenic. Well, that settles that.

“The killer somehow fed him the poison, waited for it to take effect and took him apart,” Brian concludes.  
“As you do,” Jimmy says. “I wonder how long he planned it for.”

“Not a crime of passion, that’s for sure.” Beverly sighs, taking the gloves and lab coat off again. “E-mail the results to Jack, would you.”  
“Already did. Think we’ll get a thank you?”  
Beverly laughs as Jimmy unceremoniously rolls the guy into the freezer and shuts the door.

“All right. Beer at my place?” Brian asks, oddly hopeful. He thinks that if he’s going to have to spend another night feeling sorry for himself he might snap and start amputating people’s limbs himself.

“Can’t. Busy,” Bev says, tugging loose the band keeping her hair out her face, causing her dark hair to cascade attractively around her shoulders. Almost a shampoo commercial, if it weren’t for all the dead people parts stored neatly around her. L’Oreal, because even when you spend your day slicing into cadavers in the company of two geeks you’re still worth it.  
“Date?” Jimmy asks her.

“Yes, actually. His name is David. He has curly hair and plays the cello. Our children will be gorgeous musical geniuses.” She grins.  
“May want to wash the decaying torso stink off first, though,” Brian comments, and she waves an impatient hand at him.  
“Way ahead of you. Not meeting him for another two hours, so I’m just going to go and make myself smell like the mother of his future children now.” And she’s gone again, off to beat him at the Making Something Of My Life game.

Brian turns to Jimmy, raising an eyebrow. “I have the Mythbusters DVD box set. Take-out optional.”  
Jimmy offers him a gap-toothed grin.

***

“One of these days I’m getting Bev to come here,” he says around a mouthful of chicken fried rice.  
“Give it up. She knows you too well,” Jimmy comments, struggling with his chopsticks. Brian could offer him a fork, but this is more fun. On the screen Adam Savage is preparing to blow up something or other, he wasn’t paying a lot of attention. Something to do with hair cream, he thinks, but he’s not connecting the dots over the four cans of beer he’s already downed.

Jimmy is still one ahead of him though, which is weirdly annoying.  
“Isn’t Estelle waiting for you at home?” he asks him. Jimmy gives him a non-committal sort of shrug. Jimmy’s wife is a force of nature, a short, round Irish-American woman with springy red hair and a well-documented problem with sticking to speed limits. Brian doesn’t necessarily understand the workings of their marriage, but they both sort of seem to do their own thing and be good with that. He can respect that, really. Live and let live and love each other at the end of the day sounds like the best deal anyone could get out of marriage.

“Must be awesome to have someone to vent to when you get home though, with all the shit we deal with on a daily basis,” he points out. Jimmy laughs so suddenly he all but inhales the bit of rice he managed to shovel into his gob and starts to cough, leaning forward and banging himself on the chest.  
“Take it easy there, bro,” Brian says, reaching to bang him between his shoulder blades a couple times.

“Jesus Christ,” Jimmy manages, still laughing. “Cause of death, choked to death on sticky rice in a messy bachelor pad.”  
“I did ask for shit we could solve with normal investigative work.”

“Doesn’t mean it has to be me on your table.” Jimmy clears his throat a couple times, takes a long swig of his beer. “And don’t think I get to go home and air my heavy heart to Estelle. She doesn’t like to hear the gory details, says they make her queasy. And even without the details…” He sits back again, swirling his beer around. “She doesn’t get it, and all. She tries, I’m sure, but it’s hard to explain the weird shit we see to people who aren’t there to see it. I usually just keep it to myself.”

And there’s the truth of it, Brian supposes. You can have a household full of people who all love you so damn much their hearts burst with it, but they still won’t _get_ it. They can’t really talk to anyone about the weird stuff they see at work, because nobody gets it. They are an alienated breed, the three of them, even if Beverly seems to handle it a whole lot better than him and Jimmy.

“At least we got each other,” he tries. “To hang around and be traumatized with, and all.”  
Jimmy smirks and raises his beer. “I’ll drink to that,” he says, and they do.

After they’re done eating, after so many Mythbusters episodes they lose count, after yet another six-pack of beers shared, Jimmy falls asleep on his couch. Brian is too tanked to do something about it, so he just takes Jimmy’s shoes off for him – he’s a good friend like that – and leaves him there for the night.

***

It’s a weird basis for nurturing a work-related friendship, but it’s all right. A Vaguely Traumatized Boys’ Club sort of thing.

“Fucking drawn and quartered fucking pizza delivery guy.”  
“I know, buddy, I know.”  
“Drawn. And quartered. Pizza delivery guy. Who does that kind of thing? And to a pizza delivery guy? What’d he ever do wrong? He brings people pizza, cheesy tidings of joy. And now he’s a goddamn jigsaw. I just can’t handle this, man.”

“I sincerely worry about anyone who could.”  
“More Mythbusters, my place, eight-ish?”  
“God, yes. I’ll bring the food.”  
“Something that’s not pizza, if you please.”

***

The Chesapeake Ripper strikes again, leaving three expertly eviscerated corpses across Woodlawn. Brian didn’t even need to argue with people to get them to accept it was the Ripper – it was so obviously his M.O. he might as well have signed his name on the bodies. The three of them work deep into the night cataloguing all the missing bits, while Jack has apparently toddled off to some fancy dinner party in Baltimore with pretty Dr. Bloom in his wake.

Will sat in the autopsy room with them for a while, mumbling something about having declined an invitation himself – what the hell sort of socialite would invite him to a dinner party at all, Brian can only wonder– but eventually wandered out looking oddly nauseated.

Brian doesn’t think it was the autopsies that did it, cause he’s seen Will all but dive nose-first into those before, but the guy’s been looking a little peaky lately. Not that he cares, though. They got Beverly to do that.  
“He looks tired.”  
“It’s almost two AM. We’re all looking tired.”

“I don’t think I’m even awake,” Jimmy says, elbow deep in some poor woman’s chest cavity. “This is me, doing an autopsy in my sleep. This lung has been removed beautifully, by the way, I kind of want to take a picture and frame it on my wall.”

“Well, there’s looking tired and looking like death is knocking at your door, and Will’s been looking a lot like the latter as of late,” she says, worried still, evading Jimmy’s non-sequiturs with practiced ease.  
“I’m sure he’s fine. It’s a rough case,” Jimmy says, and Brian wants to draw a picture of how much he genuinely doesn’t give a shit.

“All right, I’m done,” she says, stepping back from the autopsy table. “I’m just going to type this up and mail it to Jack so he’ll have it in the morning. You two round this off?”  
“Sure. It’ll be a party.”  
“Whoo. I’ll bring nibbles.”  
“God, I hate you both.”

Jimmy laughs as she leaves, taking off his visor.  
“One day that woman will beat the both of us to a bloody pulp, you know that right,” Brian says.  
“I will accept our queen’s wrath rightfully.”  
“Oh, yeah. Queen Bev and the Vaguely Traumatized Boys’ Club, I can see it now.”

“The Vaguely Traumatized Boys’ Club?”  
“Well.”  
Jimmy takes a moment, peeling his gloves off. “Alright,” he says. “Why not.”  
Brian feels weirdly proud. Maybe they could get matching t-shirts. He pictures how much that would tick off Jack Crawford, and feels giddy. “Too late for a beer?”

Jimmy sighs. “Yes, actually. Way too late.”  
“Oh.”  
“Not too late for hard liquor though. Have any?”  
“I think I have a bottle of tequila, somewhere.”

“Jesus Christ, I didn’t realise you were a sorority girl.”  
“You want it or not?”  
Of course Jimmy wants it. The bottle is unopened, though he can’t for the life of him remember where he got it, and although there’s genuinely no place to get a fresh lime at 2:30 AM in Quantico they manage to get halfway through the bottle without even really trying, slumped together on his couch.

Jimmy is telling him some anecdote about a crime scene, leaned with drunken comfort against his right shoulder and gesticulating wildly, but Brian’s not really listening. It’s damn near four in the morning, he’s not entirely sure what time he and Jimmy are expected to be at the B.A.U. the following day, and he’s so tipsy it feels like his entire apartment is leaning slightly to the left.

“The Vaguely Traumatized Boys’ Club,” Jimmy says. “You’re a weird, weird man, Zeller.” He throws back another shot, burps, grins at himself.  
“I feel very emotionally connected to the moniker,” Zeller says, pointing his right index finger at the ceiling though he’s not sure _why_.  
“Are you really vaguely traumatized?”  
“Naw. I mean. Maybe a _little_ , but in our line of work we call it ‘seasoned’ and roll with it. I’m just being witty.”  
“Yeah. Yeah, you are.”

Jimmy is looking at him funny. He wonders if it might be the tequila, but Jimmy holds his liquor a lot better than Brian does, so that’s probably not it. Brian shrugs at him, gives him his most winning smile, leans up to pour himself another shot and Jimmy kisses him.

 _Well that came out of nowhere_ , he finds himself thinking with startling lucidity. Jimmy tastes of alcohol and unbrushed teeth, is kissing him with a genuine sort of urgency, and Brian wishes Jimmy would have let him get another shot first because he’s rather seriously not drunk enough for this.

He doesn’t even realize he’s actually _kissing him back_ until they’re already sort of sprawled across his couch together and Jimmy’s somehow got a hand up his shirt like some grabby teenager. He’s a phenomenal kisser, though, which is so incredibly stupid he’s not sure whether to get angry or to buy him a little plaque or something.

“What the hell are we doing,” he says into Jimmy’s mouth.  
“Making out like randy college boys,” Jimmy mumbles, licking wetly at his ear. Brian shivers unpleasantly.  
“We’re not, though. Randy college boys.”  
College boys, nope, but he really shouldn’t be talking about being randy. He’s got an embarrassingly hard dick poking right into Jimmy’s hipbone, and Jimmy’s noticed it, too.

Oh, hell.

“You do know I’m not gay, right?”  
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Jimmy says. Of course he doesn’t.  
Another approach. “What about your wife?!”  
“She doesn’t mind that you’re not gay either.”  
“No wait, that’s not– holy Jesus shit Price that’s my dick. You’re touching my... Jimmy, you’re _married_!”

“Don’t worry about that,” Jimmy says, tugging Brian’s dick free from his jeans. He gives it a bit of an appreciative smile that Brian isn’t sure he should take as a compliment or not. His mind races, trying to come up with more feeble-minded excuses as to why this is an astoundingly stupid idea, but he comes up short mostly because, and this is a shocker - _he really wants this to happen right now_. It comes at him like a baseball bat to the head, knocking all other thoughts out across the living room, and Jimmy slides down and starts sucking him off with the same kind of motivated gusto he was kissing him with earlier and Brian struggles to remember how to breathe.

He’s even better at this than the kissing. He’s learning truly mind-boggling things about Jimmy fucking Price today, that’s for sure.

He lets it come over him, laying back on his couch, Jimmy now sitting between his knees and giving him what might be the absolute best blowjob he’s ever received. He wonders if it’s the tequila. He wonders if this is what happens, in Vaguely Traumatized Boys’ Clubs. And then he doesn’t wonder anything at all, because his orgasm sort of sneaks up on him and he’s entirely too busy throwing his head back, curling his toes and garbling what he thinks might have actually been Jimmy’s name.

Jimmy spits Brian’s jizz into his shotglass. That’s possibly the grossest thing Brian has ever seen, and he erupts into a fit of hysterical laughter. “Holy shit. That’s. What the hell, Jimmy.”  
“I’ve been thinking of doing that for really too long,” Jimmy says, sort of stretching out next to him on the couch and sticking his nose into Brian’s ear. There’s something oddly affectionate about it, which makes Brian feel a little funny.

He wonders if he ought to reciprocate. It’d be polite, at the very least. He doesn’t know if he’d be capable of it, actually, doing stuff like that to another guy, let alone fucking _Jimmy Price_ , but only one way to find out. He puts panicky hands to Jimmy’s nethers and starts fiddling with his buttons, but Jimmy breathes a giggle into his ear and he feels instantly discouraged.  
“Brian,” he says with the eerie patience of the inebriated, “I’m fifty three years old and drunk as a skunk. Whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish down there, it isn’t gonna happen.”  
“Oh thank God,” he gibbers before he’s managed to stop it coming out, and Jimmy just laughs again.

“But I’m spending the night though, just so you know,” he says. “And I’m sleeping in your bed, not on the damn couch.”  
“Whatever,” Brian says with a sigh, and Jimmy sits up and kisses him again, slowly, with a lazy kind of warmth, and Brian thinks this is all entirely too pleasant for such a weird fucking situation.


	2. Chapter 2

He wakes up because his cell phone buzzes on his nightstand like a freight train thundering through his bedroom. 

Jimmy is still asleep. Jimmy is in his underwear, on his stomach, drooling onto his pillow, one hand resting just above Brian’s belly button. It’s the hand that does it, Brian thinks, a weird, affectionate little gesture of physical intimacy, of being comfortable touching the other. It may even be a little bit possessive, and Brian is _naked_ and he doesn’t even remember taking his clothes off at all.

He remembers that nothing happened after the blowjob, though. Little bit of kissing, sure, and more cuddling than he’d ever pictured two grown men to do in bed together, but that was genuinely all and thank fucking God for that.

But he’s still naked. And Jimmy is still there. And his head is throbbing, he’s got a taste in his mouth like all of Will Graham’s dogs crawled in there to die, and he has to pee so badly it hurts. 

He sits up and closes his eyes until the wave of nausea washing over him has faded. He goes to take the longest piss he’s ever taken, and retrieves his boxers from where they were, for some reason, left on the threshold to his bedroom. He’s not usually that modest, but feels a little weird about crawling back into bed with Jimmy naked as the day he was born.

He only remembers it was his phone that woke him up after he’s already settled back into bed. He plucks it off his nightstand and reads the message, a quick and entirely humorless note from Crawford to let him know he wants to see the three of them at the B.A.U. at ten. He unceremoniously plops his phone back on his nightstand and rubs his eyes with both hands. 

When he drops his hands back down he sees Jimmy is awake, and watching him with the kind of bleary scrutiny a man can only manage when waking up in a strange bed with a massive hangover.  
“Jack wants us at the B.A.U. in two hours,” Brian croaks, the sound of his own voice grating like tinfoil between his teeth.

“Fun,” Jimmy says.  
“Yeah,” Brian says, and they lay together and say nothing. He thinks he ought to do something. Say something. Offer Jimmy coffee and some Advil. Throw himself off the roof. Something.  
He says nothing and considers a nice bit of hyperventilating, maybe.

“It’s nice how we’re not being all awkward about this,” Jimmy points out and Brian sputters into a throaty laugh that manages to still taste worryingly of tequila.  
“Oh, yes, I’m extremely comfortable with the situation,” he says, and Jimmy smirks at the ceiling. 

“Good. Great! Just so you know, I really want to kiss you again, but your breath smells about the same as I imagine mine does so I’m holding off on that.”  
“Thank you for your consideration.”

“You do want me to kiss you again?” It’s a question accompanied by a raised eyebrow and a great deal less pressure than Brian would expect. He knows, on some level, that if he says no now Jimmy will simply back off to snark another day, no hard feelings. He also knows that if he says yes he’s heading into really weirdly unknown territory with all this, that he’s not sure he ought to be heading into at all. With a guy. With a _married_ guy. With _Jimmy_.

Still, though. He was so goddamn good at it he kind of wants to know what it’d be like without all the tequila fogging him up.  
“Strangely enough, yes, I do,” he says.  
“Fantastic. Just checking.”

Brian laughs, Jimmy laughs along with him, and that’s that, he supposes. They brush their teeth and French kiss by the bathroom sink for a good ten minutes and Brian has no idea how to feel about any of it, so he just goes with ‘all right’ because that’s the least complicated one out of all options presented. 

*****

They stand in the darkened conference room while Jack shows slides full of dead people – most of the pictures taken by the one, the only, the insanely talented Brian Zeller, thank you very much – and yells at nobody in particular about things being unacceptable and urgent and whatnot. 

Will Graham is there too, standing in the back, still looking queasy and sort of unwashed, and Beverly keeps shooting him these worried looks. She’s the only one doing it too, which Brian supposes is really a little sad. The guy looks like he needs a bath, a hug, and a cup of hot cocoa. Not necessarily in that order. 

Jimmy catches his eye from across the room. He makes a face at him, pulling his lips into a thin line, and Brian gives him a little half-shrug and quietly mimes taking a shot. They grin at each other and Brian feels his stomach twist weirdly to the left in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with his hangover at all, and knows he’s in deep shit.

*****

It’s going to happen again. It’s decidedly obvious, though Brian doubts anyone other than the two of them realizes. Nothing else changes. They spend their days going through the fingerprint database, analyzing fibers, bitching at Beverly about how much the coffee from the machine down the hall sucks, and playing one truly epic game of office ping pong when Beverly is out to lunch on Tuesday. 

The cellist again, apparently, and he and Jimmy hum a wedding march as she leaves. The week continues to fizzle to an uneventful end where nobody dies, but as it turns out that doesn’t mean Brian won’t get to have more awkward sex with coworkers. 

Jimmy shows up at his door on Thursday for no reason at all. They watch the first hour of The Hangover, which they both incidentally hate, and eat microwave popcorn. Then the popcorn runs out, Jimmy decides that’s the perfect excuse to put his tongue in Brian’s mouth, and it’s all rather downhill from there. 

As it turns out sucking dick isn’t as weird as he thought it would be. His jaw starts to hurt, his tongue gets tired, but to be fair that happens while going down on girls, too. The repetitive vague triggering of his gag reflex is new, this teetering on the edge of not-quite-nausea, but he thinks he can learn to get a handle on that. The only thing he finds really off-putting about the whole thing is, to be honest, dealing with his own saliva dripping down Jimmy’s prick, and he wonders if that’s a simple matter of learning to do this... more dryly.

Jimmy is endlessly enthusiastic though, laughing and gasping and actively encouraging him the entire way, and Brian quietly adds ‘the taste of semen’ to the list of things that aren’t even half as bad as he was expecting them to be.

*****

Another day, another crime scene for Will Graham to contaminate. Okay, so maybe that’s not an entirely fair assessment, cause the guy has been keeping his mitts to himself so far that day, but it still bugs to stand at the edges of a gloriously untouched scene full of potential evidence and have to wait until Will Graham is done playing at The Stupendous Yappi across the carefully sealed arena.

Two bodies, left neatly in the middle of an abandoned office goods warehouse. Side by side, naked, and drained entirely of their blood. The procedure was well executed too, by a killer who’d clearly done this before, probably in a medical capacity of some sort.

“What do you think he did with the blood?” Beverly asks, inspecting the tidy needle wounds in one of the victims’ neck.  
“Maybe he drank it,” Brian says. “The Virginia Vampire.”  
“Let’s not start gracing the bastard with a name just yet,” Jack grumbles, standing over them with his hands on his hips.

“There are so many reasons why someone would drain people’s blood,” Jimmy says, circling the bodies and taking photos . “Religious motivations. Cannibalism. Interior decorating.”  
“Interior decorating?”  
“Sure.”

Brian sighs and stands, looking around the room. “To really properly drain someone you’re best off hanging them upside down. I see no evidence of that kind of rigging having taken place in here.”  
“He drained them somewhere else,” Graham says, standing off to the side and looking distracted. “Have we searched the entire premises?”  
“Almost,” Beverly says.

“What’s in there?” He points at a closed door across the hall.  
“Old administration room, I think.”

Graham trots towards it with determination. Brian isn’t about to let him get the first look at something that might be important so he follows suit. There’s an odd smell as Graham opens the door, one Brian doesn’t place as quickly as he should, considering his profession, and they step into the dimly lit room as Graham carefully pushes the door all the way open.

There’s a whirr, a noise of pulleys and rope and something very wet sloshing about, and Brian realizes what’s going to happen seconds before it does. At least this gives him enough of a chance to close his eyes before what turn out to be several buckets of lukewarm, sticky blood are dumped over him, Graham and one unsuspecting FBI agent stepping in behind them. 

Their reactions are similar in a fascinating degree – all three of them freeze, hold their breath, share a horror Brian didn’t even want to ever contemplate actually _happening_ to him, and he hears Beverly suck in an entirely too accurate expletive while Jack starts shouting for people to help them out. 

He feels the blood slowly dribble down his face, his neck, into the collar of his shirt. The stink of it is overwhelming, copper and something dead and wet, and Brian wishes he could take his skin off like a suit to escape from it.

The FBI agent goes down in a dead faint across the linoleum. Will Graham looks at him, then turns to Brian, and their eyes meet for the very, very first time since they even met. He looks shocked, and it takes Brian a moment to realize that it’s not necessarily the blood that’s shocked him but the realization that it’s _real_ , not some crime scene induced fever dream. 

Another first for the two of them – in that moment, Brian Zeller understands exactly how Will Graham feels.

The rest of the day goes by in a haze of chemical disinfectant and driving home in borrowed clothes. He had to leave everything he was wearing behind as equal parts evidence and biohazardous waste, and God damn it if he wasn’t wearing that leather jacket that makes him look like Knight Rider which he will now never see again. 

It bothers him the perp got one hand up on them this way, it bothers him his clothes are done for, it bothers him he wasn’t allowed to continue aiding the investigation afterwards. It _bothers_ him he comes home to an empty apartment with nobody to bitch to about getting doused in blood and nobody to give him a little bit a sympathy, a cup of tea or something similarly friendly. 

But mostly, obviously, it bothers him that he’s never felt this disgusting and tainted in his life. He still smells the stuff, feels it caked into his hair, and it’s really fucking violating and for the killer’s sake he hopes they never wind up in a room together because the things he wants to do to the guy for this are decidedly not friendly.

He has to wash his hair three times to stop the water being red. He has a thick head of hair which is apparently capable of clinging to sick amounts of dried blood and it’s like it never ends. He showers and shampoos and rinses until his scalp feels numb and his skin starts to go all wrinkly. He may have had a bit of a cry halfway through the middle – he’s alone in his apartment and can cry in the fucking shower if he wants to – and stands cold and drippy in his shower cubicle for a good ten minutes after he’s turned the tap off.

He still doesn’t feel clean. 

He toddles unhappily about his apartment in clean boxers and his bathrobe for half an hour, making himself that cup of tea but forgetting it on the kitchen counter and opening some mail he can’t manage to sit down long enough for to read. That’s when Jimmy shows up at his door, and while Brian isn’t going to admit to it he’s never been fucking happier to see him there.

“You’re kind of pink. How long did you shower for?”  
“Three years, give or take. Still not sure I got all of it.”

“You look more than just Vaguely Traumatized, now.”  
“I _feel_ more than just Vaguely Traumatized,” he mutters. He plops down on his sofa, reaching up to run his hands through his damp hair but changing his mind at the last moment, wincing with how gross it makes him feel. “You try getting full-on Carrie’d and keeping up good cheer.”

“This isn’t gonna make you feel a lot better, but I’ve confirmed that all the blood was, in fact, human,” Jimmy says.  
“Of course.”  
“You should get some tests run for blood-borne pathogens.”  
“Sure. That would just round off this perfect day, ending up with some kind of rot because of all this.”

Jimmy stands in the middle of his living room, looking down at his feet. “Something else though. There was too much blood for it to have come from just two people. We’re looking for more victims.”

Oh, God. He knew this on some level, understood that two human beings could never carry enough blood to thoroughly drench three grown men with, but had been staunchly repressing this tidbit. He wondered how many people it were. He wondered if they were still alive when the killer strung them up to drain them.

“I think I want to take another shower,” he mumbles miserably. Jimmy nods sympathetically. Brian leaves him in the living room, gets back into his shower, and it’s around the second time he’s shampooing his hair – or the fifth overall, if you’re nitpicky – that Jimmy gets in with him.

He rinses his hair out for him, washes his body with near ridiculous care, presses close and offers so much more comfort than Brian could have asked for. He kisses Jimmy with just a little more despair than he would have liked, but Jimmy lets him.

There’s a lot of water-slick skin, a lot of rubbing together, and Jimmy pins him against the cold tiled wall and pushes and grinds them together until Brian finds himself unable to think and just lets it all go.

Afterwards they lie in his bed together, not saying another word, and Brian focuses on Jimmy’s breathing and feels better. It’s not even eight o’clock yet but he falls asleep with Jimmy’s lips on his forehead, his arms around his shoulders, and sleeps like a baby.

*****

He sits in their office space by himself the following day, occasionally scratching his scalp absentmindedly. As it turns out washing your hair six times in one evening leaves one with a decidedly dry scalp and a vague tendency towards dandruff. Still better than flecks of dried blood, though. 

Jimmy had holed himself up in the lab a couple hours earlier, trying to find prints on their two corpses with single-minded determination. He doesn’t even know where the fuck Beverly went. 

He’s poring over the results of the tests Jimmy ran on the blood. It’s like a fucking high school math problem, is what it is. At least four different people, possibly more, and he’s at something of a loss how to begin making sense of it. On the up side, they found absolutely no traces of HIV or anything else he really really doesn’t want to come away from all this with, so that’s a load off his mind.

He doesn’t notice Will Graham standing in his door until he clears his throat at him.  
“Oh. Hey,” he says and wonders how long he stood there, dawdling, hoping to be noticed. He looks hideous - pasty, with bags under his eyes big enough to carry his groceries in. Brian, of course, can’t resist. “You look like shit.”  
“Thanks,” he grumbles. “I feel like it, too.”

They say nothing for a stretching moment, Will enthusiastically avoiding eye contact and Brian wondering what the hell to say to the weirdo in his doorway. 

“I just wondered... if you were all right,” Will says as if it hurts him to say it. Brian almost wonders if Alana Bloom is back there somewhere, forcing him to be sociable at gunpoint.  
“Right. Yeah. No, I’m fine. Took about two dozen showers, cried like a girl, you know. Dealt with it.” _Had sex with a coworker until all I could think of was orgasms and not so much human blood drying up in my ear_ , he thinks to himself. He fails to keep the smile off his face.

To his own surprise, Will Graham actually smiles back. Okay, the smile is directed at the carpet and not so much at Brian himself, but it’s still there. “Yeah, same,” he says. “Although I like to think my crying was the epitome of rugged and masculine.” 

Brian snorts out a laugh and Will looks almost startled, as if he hadn’t expected his joke to land. After a moment’s confusion he looks up and smiles again. Still not _at_ Brian, really more at Brian’s general area, but Brian supposes that’s a sight better than smiling at the rug.

“Are we seriously connecting over a shared blood bath?” he asks, raising an entertained eyebrow at Will.  
Will shrugs. “I don’t know. Surely an experience like that leaves a kind of... unspoken bond.”  
“Nothing like a little messy trauma to bring people together.”  
This time the smile is very much for Brian, and Brian is weirdly dumbstruck. Making friends with Will fucking Graham. Who would have thought? 

Jimmy appears behind Will in the doorway, looking hyperactive and a little out of place. He found prints, then. Good.  
“House call?” he asks.  
“Something like that,” Will says, stepping aside to let him in.

“You okay? You look... well. Like you’re not,” Jimmy says, and Brian wonders if he shouldn’t have asked that himself a little earlier. Oh well.

“Fine. Took a couple showers. Failed to scrub my soul clean. Nothing out the ordinary.”  
Jimmy chuckles, more social nicety than genuine amusement. “Oh, tell me about it. I’ve never seen anyone wash his hair with quite as much gusto as Brian yesterday.”  
Will gives him an odd look, and Brian isn’t sure whether he wants to laugh or cry. Jimmy seems delightfully oblivious. 

“You’ll have to get a blood test, though. We didn’t find any blood-borne pathogens yet, but doesn’t mean we won’t,” he says.  
“I will,” Will says, forces his mouth into something not quite a smile but surely intended to be polite. He fidgets, then turns and leaves without another word. 

Jimmy turns to Brian and grins. “Do I have to get jealous now?”  
“You just more or less told him you watched me shower.”  
“I did? Oh. Woops?”

“Very smooth. Think he’ll put two and two together?”  
“I know you don’t like to admit it, but he’s a clever fellow, so yes.”  
“Fantastic.” 

“Oh, relax. He’s hardly the type to rush to the water cooler with this.”  
That, Brian supposes, is very true. If you have to slip up and accidentally reveal your outrageous office romance to anyone, that person being the antisocial recluse with the dogs and the nervous sweats might be the best one to do it to. 

It takes him a moment to catch up with the fact he just referred to what he and Jimmy have as a ‘romance’. He sits and feels decidedly weird about that while Jimmy spins into an enthusiastic diatribe about the perfect thumbprint he found on the back of one of the victim’s neck.


	3. Chapter 3

“So do we like, name this?” he asks Jimmy a week later. He doesn’t always understand why they keep at it, beyond the usual ‘because it’s fun’ and ‘it’s not like I was getting any elsewhere’. He expertly avoids working out his feelings over all this, including the feelings for Jimmy he staunchly insists to himself he doesn’t have, but there’s a part of him that’s still weirdly curious about what Jimmy’s in it for. 

It’s the same part of him, he supposes, that enjoys cutting up dead people for a living to find out what caused them to stop ticking. Curiosity in the face of potentially gross stuff. 

“I thought you already named it. The Vaguely Traumatized Boys’ Club.”  
“Boys’ Clubs don’t usually include this many blowjobs.”  
“You’ve clearly not been in many.”

He doesn’t really know what to say to that so he just says nothing. They’re in his bed – or _on_ his bed, perhaps more accurately, sprawled buck naked across his duvet. They’re still head to groin in a lazy remnant of an earlier sixty nine, Jimmy drawing circles around his belly button with his index finger. 

“An affair, though. We’re having an affair,” Brian says.  
“I guess so, yeah.”  
“You don’t think this is weird?”

“No, this all looks pretty common to me. I hear guys in their midlife crisis find themselves a nice younger lover all the time.”  
“You’re too old for a midlife crisis, and I am not a sporty convertible”  
“I’d say you’re more of a hatchback. Also, fuck you.”

Giving in to a long-treasured urge, he reaches and thwaps Jimmy across the head. He just laughs at him and rolls onto his back to entwine his fingers under the back of his head. The bastard is entirely too comfortable in Brian’s bed by now. He fights the urge to shove him out, just for kicks.

“Did you have a lot of... male lovers, though?” He cringes at the word. _Lover_. Like they’re in some weird movie from the forties.   
“You’re not the first.”

“You’re married, though.”  
“And?”  
“To a woman.”  
“I’m not seeing the point you’re trying to make.”

Brian sighs. Jimmy sees the point full well. Jimmy just thinks it’s a _stupid_ point, and doesn’t want to discuss it. Brian supposes that’s even true, too. It’s not like it matters much, in the grand scheme of things. He’s not even having as much of an identity crisis as one might expect him to, so why would he expect one of Jimmy?

“Fine, let’s put this another way. Should I still consider myself as single?”  
Jimmy raises an eyebrow at him and scratches at his skinny chest. “I don’t know. If I were you, I’d consider myself lucky. For getting to bed the beast that is me.”

“For God’s sake.” Brian rolls away from him, onto his side. He’d get up off the bed but he’s lazy and the bed is comfy and, you know. It’s _his_ fucking bed. “Just give me something I can work with, Price. This isn’t a comedy show, it’s my life.”

The bed dips and sags and Jimmy curls up against his back, pressing a kiss behind his ear. “I won’t care if you still choose to consider yourself as single. But it’d be nicer if you didn’t. Not all the way single, anyway.”  
“And what are you, then?”  
“Incredible.”

“Jimmy, come on. I don’t want to find your wife at my door one day brandishing a pickaxe.”  
“Estelle doesn’t mind. And I don’t think we own a pickaxe, so I wouldn’t worry too much.”   
“What do you mean she doesn’t mind?”  
“I mean it like I say it. She doesn’t mind that I... wander.”

He turns back around for that, giving Jimmy an astonished stare over his shoulder. Right. Of course. Of course Jimmy would have a wife who knows he’s into the occasional guy and allows him to let his freak flag fly. He doesn’t even know what to fucking say to that.

“You fucking bastard,” he chooses to go with, and Jimmy grins, does this weird one-shouldered shrug and nuzzles into him some more. Brian turns back and thinks about this for a bit.

“Can I still sleep with women?” he asks.  
“You have any in mind?”  
“Oh, dozens.”  
Jimmy snorts a laugh right into his ear and Brian bats half-heartedly at him. “You go ahead and sleep with any woman you can get.”

“Are you insulting my game?”  
“Unless the game you’re referring to is Tetris, yes, I am.” Brian has to admit he’s really good at Tetris. A remnant of being the geeky kid in the back of the class who got picked on for his good grades, always got chosen last during P.E. and spent every lunch hour playing the game on his Gameboy. Ah, the early nineties, he remembers them with weary distaste.

“I can get all the tail I want,” he mumbles into his duvet.  
“Of course, poppet, sure you can,” Jimmy says soothingly into his hair, and he elbows him for the ‘poppet’.

“I fancied the pants off of you since I met you, though,” Jimmy says, smoothly dragging the conversation away from Brian’s utterly delightful track record with the ladies.  
“Fancied the pants off of me.”  
“Well. Crush would make me sound like a teenage girl. But something like that.”

“Then your game is fucking awful because I never noticed a thing. I didn’t even notice when you already had my dick in your mouth.”  
“To be fair we were kind of drunk that time. I could’ve hired a mariachi band to accompany us and you wouldn’t have noticed that, either.”

“Can you hire a mariachi band to follow Jack Crawford around some day?”  
“Sure. The day I find myself a suicidal mess you’ll be able to tell by the soothing sounds of the Mexican hat dance coming from Jack’s office.”  
“Good man.”

They only manage to keep their faces straight for a fleeting few seconds, then dissolve into entirely too childish giggles together. Jimmy wraps his arm around Brian’s chest and Brian entwines their fingers and supposes he doesn’t necessarily feel any more enlightened about the very nature of their affair but wonders if this is the kind of thing he shouldn’t need to be enlightened about.

***

The Virginia Vampire drained seven people of their blood. The name caught on, and Brian feels oddly proud, even if Jack Crawford keeps shooting him looks that suggest many violent things Brian rather wouldn’t contemplate.

It’s the thumbprint Jimmy found that eventually leads to his arrest too, which brings a whole other, if equally odd kind of pride for Brian. He winds up talking to the cute blonde telecommunications specialist from upstairs about Jimmy’s modest victory for about twenty minutes, until she politely excuses herself and he realizes he forgot to flirt with her in lieu of gushing over Jimmy fucking Price. That’s just _problematic_ , really.

In the evening Beverly treats them to a celebratory beer. “I was gonna just invite Jimmy,” she teases, “But I’d hate to break up your Statler and Waldorf shtick.”

This, of course, leads to the first half hour or so in the bar being dedicated to figuring out which of them would be Statler and which would be Waldorf, Jimmy piping in that he really thinks Brian is more of a Gonzo, what with his undying love for chickens and things that go boom, and Brian dubbing Jimmy Beaker for the rest of the evening. 

They ask Bev about her cellist, and she’s gleefully evasive. This means it’s going well, which Brian is glad to hear. Of course Bev then asks Jimmy about Estelle, which just makes Brian feel awkward.

He still takes Jimmy home with him, has sex with him on his couch, and falls asleep with his arm growing numb under Jimmy’s head. In the morning Jimmy leaves very early, not wanting to show up at work in the same clothes he wore when leaving the bar, and Brian goes back to bed for an hour or two but can’t manage to get some more sleep.

***

It’s a pleasant experience for Brian to be able to surprise Jimmy. It doesn’t happen often, really, and their affair is just one ‘what the hell, Jimmy Price’ after the other. So, yes, he does enjoy getting his own little ‘what the hell, Brian Zeller’ in and watching Jimmy at a loss for words for once.

“So, do you want to or not?”  
“Well. Yes. I’m a little shocked you’re just requesting it like this, though.”  
“It’s not like it’d be the first time.”

Jimmy gives him an odd look and Brian shrugs. “Her name was Cassie, we dated for a little over a year, and boy did we have a lot of fun with her pretty purple strap-on.”

This prompts Jimmy to smile at him in a way that suggests he’s about to propose marriage, and bigamy is rather seriously frowned upon in Virginia so Brian hopes he won’t go there. “Gosh. And here I was treating you like a fragile little flower.”

“If that’s how you treat fragile little flowers I’m really happy I’m not actually one of those. Now get the hell over here, you dick, I have a mighty need.”

Jimmy doesn’t stop laughing for entirely too long, and Brian has to actually yell at him a little before he does. By that time he’s already got two fingers pushing in and out of him so the yelling requires a fat lot of actual effort too, and Brian thinks he ought to be actually commended for not flat-out strangling the happy bastard.

There’s some fairly obvious differences between being fucked up the ass by a cute girl with a silicone rubber dildo, or a genuine flesh-and-blood man with a flesh-and-blood penis. Still, the bottom line comes down to the same, the same pleasurable fullness, the same sort of stimulation, and the same ridiculously breathtaking intimacy. 

It’s overwhelming and Brian goes limp with it at first, distracted right out of his erection, but as with everything else Jimmy is really fucking good at this and coaxes him right back into it. 

Brian is on his knees, ass in the air, his forehead resting on his forearms. Jimmy’s hands are all over him as he thrusts in a shockingly steady rhythm and Brian has trouble catching his breath. Those wandering hands do eventually find their way to his dick, Jimmy’s lips press between his shoulder blades, and Brian actually _sobs_ and he can feel Jimmy’s quiet chuckle across his skin.

“I’m gonna fucking kill you,” he manages.  
“I know,” Jimmy says fondly, doing ever more astonishing things to him, and Brian balls his fists in his pillow and orgasms loudly and indignantly. 

After his own climax Jimmy stumbles to the bathroom to deal with the condom and Brian lies in his bed and tries not to think about how entire body feels a bit funny, weak, his bones turned to pudding after a particularly fine spike of pleasure he plans to repeat often in the foreseeable future. 

Jimmy comes back, goose-fleshed, and hurries under the duvet with him. He’s all kisses across Brian’s collar bones and neck, a skinny leg thrown across Brian’s thighs, and Brian wonders how the hell it can be he feels this at ease with, of all people, Jimmy Price.

“I really hate how good a lay you are,” he mumbles, covering his eyes with his arm.   
“Thank you? And that’s the upside to having an older lover, you know. We know our stuff.”

“And here I was wasting my time with cute young women.”  
“You poor misguided chump.”   
He laughs, arm still across his face, though it feels more like he’s laughing at himself than Jimmy’s joke. 

“You wanna go watch Back to the Future?” Jimmy brought the box set. Brian was a little surprised at Jimmy _owning_ the box set, but there it was. Jimmy must have been about twenty five when the movie came out, though, which makes him feel a little weird. Brian was eight. He remembers watching it with his sisters on VHS.

“Yeah. Just. Gimme a few minutes more.”   
He feels Jimmy’s smile against his jaw. “Need to recuperate? Want me to get you a glass of water?”

He sighs, lets his arm flop onto his pillow. “No. I’m just… comfortable, like this.” His face feels warm. He blames it on a post-sex flush. From the corner of his eye he sees the odd, if pleased look Jimmy gives him for it. He can basically count down to when Jimmy kisses him for it, pressing his fingers against his jaw to make him turn his head, and that’s all just more arguments to not get out of the bed to go watch a movie.

“You need a TV in your bedroom.” Jimmy murmurs across his teeth.  
“Are you fucking nuts, we’d never leave the room if I had one in here,” he answers, and Jimmy laughs into his mouth.

***

Brian is alone in their shared office space when the phone on Jimmy’s desk rings. Jimmy and Bev are in the lab together, doing a more than thorough analysis of the dress worn by a dead woman who was found discarded in an alley the day before. 

Brian was typing up the findings of the autopsy he performed that morning, struggling to keep his attention on the job and not wander off in the search of a cup of coffee he desperately craved, and he doesn’t react immediately when the phone begins to ring.

He hesitates, then answers anyway. “Jimmy Price’s phone, Brian Zeller speaking, how may I help you?” he says jovially.  
“Brian, darling! Jimmy busy?” 

Brian’s stomach plummets to somewhere around his feet when the cheerful voice of Jimmy’s wife chimes across the line. It’s instant awkward misery. How the hell are you supposed to have a normal conversation with the person whose spouse you’re screwing, anyway?  
“Yes,” he stammers. “In the, in the lab. Doing stuff.”

Her laugh jingles out his earpiece. “Lovely! So how have you been? Keeping busy?”  
 _I’m fucking your husband, I’m fucking your husband, oh dear God I’m fucking your husband_ , he thinks manically, the words banging around the inside of his head, and he has to bite his tongue to keep himself from actually spitting them out. “Always,” he says, and he feels his face burn. 

“Good lad! Would you mind passing a message along to Jimmy? I’ll be staying with my sister again over the weekend. She thinks she’s having health problems. Healthy as a fish, of course, all in her head, but she’d feel a lot better if she wasn’t alone... tell him to remember to feed the cat.”   
“Alright, sure,” he hears himself say. He’s shocked at how amicably he’s managing to respond, actually, since all he really wants to do is scream like a girl and throw the phone out the window. 

“Thanks! You really ought to drop by our house for dinner sometime, don’t make me beg. Bye!” And she’s gone again, phone beeping a thundering rhythm into his ear, and he sits listening to it and wondering why the hell he allowed his life to get this absurd.

He’s just about rounding off his autopsy report when Jimmy saunters back into the office, smelling oddly of disinfectant.  
“Estelle called. She’s going to her sister’s for the weekend. Don’t forget to feed the cat,” Brian recites in a weary monotone, keeping his eyes on his screen.   
“Alright. Thanks,” Jimmy says, plopping down at his desk and jiggling his mouse to get his computer out of standby. 

“She asked me to have dinner at your place sometime.”  
“Oh, that’s a nice idea, you should.”  
Brian considers throttling him, but Bev walks in with the kind of bravado that tells him she and Jimmy found something useful in their fiber analysis and he sighs and lets go of the idea. 

Jimmy shows up at his door later that night, after dutifully feeding the cat, and spends the entire weekend at Brian’s apartment. It’s the longest amount of time they’ve ever spent together and Brian is amazed at how _easy_ it is, how they fall into an odd rhythm of sex, Netflix and food, how disturbingly fucking effortless it is to just be himself around Jimmy.

It’s all impassioned scientific discussion over Vietnamese take-out, anecdotes about Jack Crawford from ye olde days that leave him with tears in his eyes from laughing, lazy fucking on a rainy Saturday morning and falling asleep on the couch together in the early evening with his head on Jimmy’s shoulder and Jimmy’s feet pulled up in his lap. 

He’s never actually had _this_ , with anyone, and lies awake with it on Sunday night after Jimmy’s gone home and wonders if he shouldn’t feel more upset about finding it with an older married guy. There’s an analogy in there, about always stumbling upon what you’re looking for in the last place you’d expect to find it, but he can’t formulate it in a way that makes sense to him.

***

He doesn’t quite know why he thinks it’s a good idea to kiss Jimmy in the lab but he winds up doing it anyway. It’s not technically the first time they sneak some affection at work – while they have been very good about keeping their personal business confined to the privacy of mostly Brian’s home, there had been some secret touches before. 

Knees bumping under tables. Stolen kisses as they said good night for the evening in deserted corridors. Maybe one brief little tugjob in the men’s room just one time, but to be fair it was way late that night and there wasn’t really anyone in the building other than them and Bev, who wasn’t about to walk in on them there anyway. 

They’d never done it in open places, places with large windows, places with more than one door in them, and certainly never in the lab. The B.A.U. lab is a big place. Lots of people work in the lab. Still, he thinks he might risk it, just the one time, because there was no one else around when Jimmy was smiling at him in that smart-ass way he does and kissing him is the only appropriate response to it Brian knows.

But, of course, because fate loves to shit all over Brian Zeller, Beverly walks in and catches him with his the tip of his tongue sliding across the back of Jimmy’s front teeth – look, he really likes that stupid fucking gap, okay – and makes a noise not unlike she’s choking on a Cheeto. Brian darts back like a startled little kitten and Jimmy somehow manages to cough and laugh at the same time. 

They’re wearing gloves, is all Brian can think of for some bizarre reason. They’re wearing lab coats and latex gloves and were about five minutes away from dissecting a dead man’s abdominal cavity and _why the fuck did he even think it was a good idea to put his tongue in Jimmy’s mouth right then_.

“Jesus Christ, I can’t leave the two of you alone for ten minutes, can I?! What the hell are you doing?” Beverly exclaims, both hands raised like the exasperated mother of a couple of rambunctious eight year olds.  
“Nothing?” Brian tries.

“Nothing my ass, getting all homo-erotic up in my goddamn lab is what you’re doing! What the hell is wrong with you? Jesus, Jimmy, does your wife know you’re making out with Brian these days!?”  
“Of course she does.”

Wherever this conversation was heading before, it thunders to a screeching halt across the squeaky clean tiles. Beverly sort of gapes, but Brian finds he has no gaping left in him to do. 

“What the fuck? Estelle actually knows about me?!” he says, his voice genuinely a few octaves higher than he’d have liked.   
“Of course she does, I told you so, didn’t I?”

“You told me she doesn’t mind you wandering, you didn’t tell me she actually knew about _me_! I had conversations with this woman thinking she had no idea!”  
“It’s not that big a deal, Brian. She has her boyfriends, I have mine. She’s been seeing this guy, I think his name is Zayne… I try not to ask.”

Well, that leaves him dumbfounded for a good couple minutes. It takes Beverly a whole lot shorter to burst into a hysterical fit of laughter while Jimmy looks entirely too innocent for his own good.

“You’re kidding me,” he says, and Jimmy just sort of _shrugs_ and Brian is, in all actuality, pretty angry right at that point. “You couldn’t have bothered to _tell_ me that?!”  
“I assumed you knew! You never thought it was weird I could just spend all these nights sleeping at your place?”

“I don’t know! I thought maybe you just lied to her really well!”  
“Oh yes because I’m such a capable liar I could just convince her of that. Of course she knows!”

“Oh God I’m dying. This is so dumb,” Bev hiccups, wiping genuine tears from her eyes. “How long have you two been at this?”  
“Not long,” Brian says.

“Few months,” Jimmy adds.  
“Almost five.”  
“Four months, two weeks, three days.”   
Brian gives him an odd look for the specificity, and Jimmy shrugs. 

“Oh, this is great. This is dandy. My two coworkers are having a secret extra-marital gay affair.” Bev takes a deep breath, shakes her head, and turns her eyes to the ceiling as if asking for strength from a God Brian knows for a fact she doesn’t believe in.

“You won’t tell anyone, will you?” he asks.  
“Who would I tell?” she says. “No, seriously. Give me names, because I’m drawing a blank, and I seriously need to run to someone right now to vent about this. Names!” She impatiently snaps her fingers in his face.

“We’re. Pretty sure Will Graham figured it out,” Brian stammers, flinching away from her.  
“Mostly because I may have accidentally told him we shower together,” Jimmy points out.  
“That’s a joke, right.”

“You have no idea how much I wish it was,” Brian says miserably.   
“So he blurts out random details about your kinky secret sex lives, and you are genuinely stunned his wife knows?” she says, turning to Brian. 

“I don’t even know, okay. I am the stupidest bucket in the janitor’s closet. Can we change the subject? Can we maybe start cutting up this guy?” He gestures at the corpse, neatly waiting under its sheet for Brian’s life to stop being a clusterfuck.

“No. We are never changing the subject again. We will rehash this subject until it’d old and tired and you both stop being dumb-asses and having affairs all over my lab. Oh God, I am never getting that image off my frontal cortex, am I.”

Jimmy starts quietly chuckling, then rapidly evolves into what Brian can only describe as a manic sort of giggle. Bev joins in, and Brian stands and considers crawling into one of the cold chambers and never coming back out.

“Seriously though, if you don’t want people to know, I suggest no more Frenching in the lab,” Beverly says, still sounding entirely too amused for the good of everyone involved.  
“Yes ma’am,” Jimmy says.

“We’ll keep the Frenching where it belongs from now on.”  
“Where does Frenching belong?”  
“France?”  
“Yes. Good idea. Go to France, both of you. Go now. Never come back.” 

“Shall we at least get started on this autopsy first?”  
Bev grins and nods, and Brian knows that, at least, she genuinely wouldn’t tell anyone. That’s the thing about regularly cutting up corpses with people, the unspoken bond was really reliable.


	4. Chapter 4

Brian has barely adjusted to a world where Beverly Katz knows he’s diddling Jimmy in his spare time, but life goes on and so does the diddling. As such Jimmy is sat in Brian’s bed in the early evening just a few days after, propped up against a couple pillows, reading an article on Brian’s iPad about stable isotope analysis of human bone tissue. He’s entirely naked, wearing nothing but his reading glasses and a pleasant post-sex glow. Brian lies back, upside down on the bed, head propped up on his left hand, and just watches him. 

The reading glasses are cute. It’s a stupid conclusion to draw about a man in his fifties, but there you go. He wonders if he would have ever drawn it had they not stumbled into their affair like they did. He wonders about how someone can become more attractive to you when you sidle closer to them. He wonders if you can fall in love with someone you’ve known for years only after you start sleeping with them, rather than before, and feels uncomfortable using the word ‘ love’ about this thing between him and Jimmy. It might be there only word there is for it, as fucked up as it is, but that doesn’t make it easy or even remotely acceptable. Brian Zeller isn’t too good at commitment, especially not to already-married people.

“I know I’m a thing of wonder and utter beauty,” Jimmy mumbles, not looking up from his iPad, “But must you stare?”  
“I’m observing,” he says, prodding Jimmy in the thigh with his foot. “Trying to figure out why the hell I like you.”  
Jimmy raises an eyebrow at him. “Well that’s a jab right in the ego. You’ve been sleeping with me for months, I surely hope you know _why_ you’re doing that.”

“Mostly because you turned out to be really good at it,” he answers, still poking his toes into Jimmy’s skinny thigh. “Which may not be entirely what you want to hear, but I deserve bonus points for honesty.”  
Jimmy puts the iPad down and stares him down from behind his glasses. “I’ve learned to take compliments where I can. Though ‘I don’t know why I like you’ doesn’t rank high on the list of things I enjoy hearing from people, least of all those naked in bed with me.”

“It’s a mystery to me, all right. I never liked guys before. I think I still don’t like guys, if I’m honest with myself. So this is messed up, is all, that out of billions of guys you’re the one who’s turned out to be my type. So I’m trying to figure that out.”  
“What’s wrong with my type?”

“You look like a particularly swishy math teacher.”  
“I’ll give you math teacher, but I take offense at swishy.”  
Brian snorts out a laugh and scrambles up to sit cross-legged on the bed, every bit as naked as Jimmy, feeling entirely too energetic for a guy who was fucked so thoroughly he barely remembered his own name only about twenty minutes ago. 

Jimmy sighs, takes the glasses off – shame - and sets them aside on Brian’s bedside cabinet. “I’d hate to sound like an old fart, but you can be attracted to people for other reasons than physical appearance, you know. Of course I am obviously only attracted to you because of your well-maintained manly stubble, but personally I rely on my humor and winning character to get me laid.”  
“Good God,” Brian says, grinning as he runs his hands down his face. “That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard. That it’s your _winning_ character that sets you apart from billions.”

“Oh, I know. You’ve not met all those billions of guys, though. Statistically speaking there ought to be a couple more out there you might want to screw.”  
“You’re right. Get the hell out of my bed, I need to go find me my couple more in a billion.”  
Jimmy just raises an eyebrow at him for that. Brian smirks.  
“Great. My boyfriend is a comedian with grand plans for rediscovering his sexuality. Why did I think this was a good idea, again?” Jimmy drawls. 

“That’s really more my line, about the good idea. And please don’t refer to me as your boyfriend.”  
“Why not?”  
“It’s weird.”

“Then what do I refer to you as? My boy-toy?”  
“Oh, fuck off.” He grabs his pillow and tosses it at Jimmy’s head. Jimmy catches it, smiling that big bright smile of his, and Brian crawls close.

“I’m stupidly fond of your smile though,” he murmurs into Jimmy’s ear, which earns him a grope and a kiss just shy of his ear.  
“I’m stupidly fond of how you make me smile,” Jimmy answers, and Brian laughs.

“Oh, cheesy. Let’s just have some more really messy sex and pretend we’re not being really sappy.” He straddles him, grinds down in a way that makes Jimmy whimper just a little bit. “You could punish me for calling you swishy,” he purrs.  
Jimmy snorts out a laugh. “Now who’s cheesy.” Still, he sits up, rolls them over, kisses him deeply, and Brian feels his cock grow hard against Jimmy's hipbone and doesn’t care so much about anything else any more. 

***

Two joggers stumble upon random body parts in Gilbert Run Regional Park. It’s not even the first time Brian was involved in a case like that, remembering that one gruesome case back in ‘08 where several human feet were found on a beach in Washington. He aided the case in a lesser capacity than he does now but still remembers it with an oddly misplaced fondness, and babbles about it to Bev while they drive to the park to inspect a set of hands discovered in some underbrush. 

The hands are a neat set, one right, one left, but turn out to belong to two different people. The fingers are all intact, so Jimmy ought to be able to do his fingerprint magic to identify them. He’s not with them now, still stuck at the B.A.U. for something or other Jack needed him for.

“The left one was taken from someone who was already dead,” Brian comments, pointing at the parts of the dead flesh that plainly tell him this. “The right one I’m not so sure.”  
“The left one is smaller. I think it’s a woman’s. The right one is obviously male. Maybe he killed her, felt sorry about it and chopped off his own hand in penance?”  
“And then left it together with hers in a park. And they say romance is dead.”

“Wedding rings are overrated, obviously.”  
Brian snaps a few photos with his trusty Nikon while Bev hovers over him. The local police are keeping a respectful distance, not so much inclined to push their noses into decaying flesh. He spots a familiar head of curly red hair on the periphery, hovering by the police tape, and steps around to neatly turn his back. 

“So do we need to talk about your daddy issues?” Bev asks, keeping her voice down, and he nearly flops forward over the dead hands.  
“Excuse me?”  
“Jimmy.”  
“I repeat, excuse me?”

“You’re having an affair with a guy seventeen years older than you. That smacks of issues, my friend.”  
“Eighteen,” he grumbles. “And I do not have ‘daddy issues’, what the hell, Bev.”  
“Whatever you say. Didn’t your parents get divorced when you were a kid?”

“Do we really need to have this conversation over severed hands?”  
“First time I’ve had you alone since I walked in on the two of you playing tonsil hockey.”  
He sighs and straightens up, scanning the surroundings. “Yes, my parents got divorced when I was twelve. No, I don’t have issues about that, and that most definitely didn’t inspire me to snuggle up to Jimmy.” 

“What did?”  
“Tequila.”  
She gives him a confused look and he shrugs, stepping back to take a few more pictures.

“Age is just a number, Bev. Me and him have… shared interests.” _Like chemical trace analysis, Discovery channel and blowjobs_ , he thinks to himself.  
“I never even knew you were into guys,” she says.

“I’m not. I wasn’t. I don’t even fucking know. Can we talk about something else?”  
“No. We’re never talking about something else ever again.” She sort of smirks at him from the corner of her eye, which he finds quite a feat but if anyone can pull that off it’s Beverly Katz, queen of their Vaguely Traumatized Boys’ Club.

“I suppose it just surprises me that you’re okay with this,” she continues, and that just leaves him a little gob smacked.  
“How do you mean?”  
“Well, not this being Jimmy or this being a guy, but this being someone who’s married. That’s what stumps me. Are you really okay with that?”

“Apparently his wife is okay with it, so I suppose that’s alright?”  
“That’s not what I mean, you dipshit,” she says, straightening up with an exasperated sigh. “Are you alright with sharing someone like that? I don’t think I’d be, is all. I’m needy. I would be a permanent ball of jealous rage.”

“Oh dear, does your cellist know about that?”  
“Never mind my cellist, we’re talking about you.”  
“I never thought about it like that.”

“Of course you didn’t. You’re such a _guy_.”  
“On behalf of my gender, hey.”  
“Is this a serious thing the two of you have going? Or is it just sex?” She’s looking up at him now, with the serious face on, and he feels weirdly cornered. Odd thing to feel, standing in the middle of a nice, open park. 

“I don’t… not sure,” he stutters. He actually doesn’t. He’d like to say it was just sex, because how easy would _that_ be, but knows that’s not true. Still, he’s not sure how serious this is, either. Things like that have proven decidedly difficult to figure out, not in the least because he’s been doing his very best to _not think about it_.

“Are you in love with him?” Oh, right. There’s the question he’s been avoiding like the plague. Danger, Brian Zeller, danger. He wonders what she’d do if he bolted off into the woods like a startled hare, but figures she’d probably just draw her gun and shoot him in the leg if he did. 

“I don’t know,” he answers lamely, and she closes her eyes and shakes her head with the kind of disappointment usually only reserved for parents of unruly teens.  
“He’s married, Brian. You need to work out the dynamics of this, or you’ll wind up with skewed expectations and I’ll have to deal with a nasty breakup across my autopsy table. It’s bad enough I can’t manage to shake the mental image of you two macking in there.”

A part of him wants to tell her to mind her own business, but he knows it actually kind of _is_. She’s right about stuff potentially happening across her autopsy table, anyway. Which makes him wonder: “Did you by any chance have this chat with Jimmy?”  
“I did, actually.”  
“And?”

“Well, it’s Jimmy. You can never get a straight answer out of that guy, can you.”  
And there’s the truth. For a guy who talks a lot, Jimmy communicates very little. It’s an approach he admires greatly and strives towards, actually.

“So you come to me instead. Grand.”  
“Not instead. I was going to come to you anyway. Even if it was just to poke fun at the daddy issues you so obviously have.”  
“Damn you.”

She sighs and starts peeling off her latex gloves. Oh, she’s done with it, then. “Look, you two are both grown-ups and can do whatever the hell you wanna do. I just don’t want to see it get messy. I’m too fond of the both of you two for that, okay.” She’s looking entirely too sympathetic now, and for some reason that makes him feel more uncomfortable than being put on the spot about his feelings for Jimmy did.  
“Okay, mom,” he says, evading her concern, and she elbows him fondly and shakes her head.

***

He’s standing at Jimmy’s front door before it hits him that this is a truly stupendous idea. He’d felt relatively calm about it the entire way there, thought he was being really nicely grown up with this approach, but standing there now, staring at the name sign, the doorbell, the goddamn gnome standing by the door, he feels like the biggest idiot wandering about Virginia. 

A _gnome_ , though. Christ. 

He’s hardly even touched the doorbell when the door swings open and Estelle grins at him like she’s a large cat and he’s a wee little tweety bird hopping about her territory. He doesn’t think he’s ever felt so intimidated by a roly poly lady barely over five feet tall in his life. Her hair is a flaming shade of red, freshly dyed, and she wears more color all at once than he’s ever seen anyone else get away with and loves her for that, just a little bit. He wonders if a part of him ought to dislike her, out of some sort of territorial jealousy maybe, but he just doesn’t have it in him. 

Estelle Price is a doll, and no amount of appreciation for the various magical things her husband can do with his tongue will make him stop thinking so.

“There he is! Jimmy isn’t here though, he’s –“  
“I know. Tennis. I’m not here for Jimmy, actually.” Of course he knew that. Jimmy plays tennis on Thursdays. That alone is enough of a curveball for the universe to throw on occasion - Jimmy fucking Price playing fucking _tennis_. What a douche. 

Her grin widens impossibly and she beckons him inside. “I was waiting for you to show up, actually. How you been? Honest answer now.”  
The Price house smells like soup and acrylic paint, with just a faint undertone of cat. The cat itself, a massive tuxedo tom ironically named Midget, side-eyes Brian from the windowsill as he sidles awkwardly into the living room. Brian isn’t a pet person and just sort of hopes it’s not gonna come over and shed fur all over his clothes. 

“I’m okay. No, that sounds depressing. I’m fine, really. Just confused, but that seems to be the norm as of late. You were waiting for me?”  
She comes into the living room with a glass of tea he didn’t ask for and sits next to him, patting him amicably on the knee. “You’re sleeping with my husband, dear. I figured you’d hobble by eventually to make sure I knew as much about that as Jimmy insisted I do.”

“In a nutshell.” He feels awkward and, for some odd reason, really huge sitting there next to her, like a big lumpy Neanderthal burning his fingertips on a hot glass of tea. He’s not much of a tea drinker, actually, but doesn’t know the rules about declining drinks offered to you by your lover’s spouse. “Have you really known all this time?”

She nods, sipping tea of her own. He wonders how she does that without burning her mouth. “To be fair, he didn’t tell me until after you two had already... well. He generally does inform me about things a-brewing, but I suppose the two of you sort of happened before he expected it to. I did know he fancied you though. He rambled on about that all the time.” She winks at him and he just goes back to feeling endlessly stupid.

He tries his own tea, does indeed burn his tongue, and puts it down on the coffee table. “How does this work, Estelle, between the two of you? I just don’t – I’ve never seen – well. An open marriage. What the hell.”  
She laughs at that, her laugh melodious like a particularly well-tuned xylophone. “Welcome to the 21st century, doll. It’s not that unusual, is it?”  
“No, seriously. It kind of is.”

“Look, as you know, me and Jimmy met later on in life, and falling in love with each other didn’t mean we were necessarily inclined to give up a certain way of life we’d gotten used to. So we just didn’t. It never even required a serious discussion, it was just how it was between the two of us. I occasionally see someone else. So does Jimmy. No big deal.”

“Then why get married at all?” It’s a despicably rude question, and that doesn’t hit him until he’s already asked it.  
“I really wanted to be the bride, for once in my life. Wear the dress. Get the ring. Be someone’s missus. Just because I’m progressive in most areas of my life, doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a little bit of tradition every now and then.” She smiles, winks, and he pictures her in a wedding dress and understands why Jimmy loves her. 

“He actually prefers men over women, you know, generally speaking. If we’d put it in percentages, I’d say Jimmy’s at about 80/20. I’m just special. Isn’t that the nicest thing you’ve ever heard?”  
He supposes it is, actually. He wonders what it’s like, being someone’s exception, and it hits him that Jimmy might just be his and it’s actually a lot less complicated than he’s made it out to be.

Maybe sometimes things just _are_ , and just because a lot of people tell you they can’t be doesn’t make them untrue. He sees how Jimmy and Estelle built their lives on that principle, and wonders how long it took them to get there. Maybe thirty four isn’t such a bad age to have these kind of epiphanies. Most people, after all, never have them at all.

“Doesn’t it bother you? Knowing he’s out there… sleeping with someone else?” he asks.  
“It doesn’t. I know he’ll come home again. And if one day he won’t, well, he’s not my property. Same way I’m not his. Life becomes a lot easier when you let go of that idea.”

“Won’t it hurt if he decides to leave you for someone else?”  
“Of course it would. But so would desperately clinging to a monogamy neither of us were made for. That’s how unhappy marriages are born.”  
Well, damn. He thinks that this should all be a lot easier to grasp for a kid of divorced parents. It makes _sense_ , anyway, how she sketches things, but he still struggles to wrap his mind around that and kind of bothers him. He’d never known himself to be quite so... conventional. 

“This is new though. With you.”  
“How do you mean?”  
“He was always more inclined to much more fleeting contacts. He’s never had something serious like this before.” She smiled. “It’s nice. I’m glad.” 

He stares at her and she gives him this oddly patient look, as if she’s perfectly well aware of the bombshell she just dropped on him and is kindheartedly waiting for him to digest it.  
“You think this is serious? That he’s serious about it?”

“As serious as he gets. It’s good, seeing him that way. He’s so happy with himself.”  
“Yeah I bet he is,” Brian mumbles, eyeing his tea. It’s still steaming, sitting on the table. He wonders how offended she’d be if he just sort of left it there. He wonders if Jimmy is really happy. He wonders about a lot of things all at once, and feels like he’s needlessly overcomplicating most of them.

“Do you seriously have a Zayne?”  
She threw her head back and laughed loudly, clapping her hands together. “Yes, yes I do. Oh lord, Brian, you should see him. Forty years old, brown as a nut. Landscape architect. Flowers brought to my door, every other Friday. Such a romantic.”  
“Does he mind Jimmy?” 

“I think he considers all that a bit of a challenge, the poor chump.”  
He laughs at this. “Jesus Estelle, this might just be the most surreal conversation I’ve had in my life. Talking to my lover’s wife about her boyfriend.”  
She just laughs some more, a little cozy ball of delight who has absolutely every reason to be as happy about life as she is, before urging him to drink his tea already. He dutifully does.

***

Talking to Bev, talking to Estelle, and doing a lot of soul-searching wound up doing wonders for Brian. He was still confused, of course. He still felt like he was rather in over his head. The picture, however, was starting to get a lot clearer, and at least he knew what it was he was over his head in.

Only thing left to do was exactly what Bev told him to – work out the dynamics of this, better known as ‘talk to Jimmy’. This wasn’t going to be very straightforward, but he was sure he could handle it. After all, if one can deal with figuring out human Jenga, everything else should be peanuts.

They’re already in bed once he manages to gather his wits. It seems a bit silly, having this conversation of all conversations when they’re still halfway in their post-orgasm daze, but any intention of having it before the sex happened was thwarted by him just being really horny and Jimmy giving him the whispered order to get on his knees. Brian thinks nobody could possibly hold him accountable for being unable to resist that. 

“We need to talk,” he says, announcing it into his bedroom. They’re lying on their backs, both their heads on one pillow. His bed is warm and comfortable with their shared heat, their bodies pressed together shoulder to hip.  
“Oh dear,” Jimmy says.  
“I wikipedia’d polyamory. Apparently all parties involved have to know what’s happening. I didn’t know what I was dipping into, ergo, you’re a dick.”

“You ‘wikipedia’d’ it. Research method of kings. You do that often?”  
“Yeah, well, I checked the Laboratory Division Library but it didn’t have anything on how to handle dating a greedy bisexual bastard.”  
“I don’t identify as bisexual. I can’t deny greedy bastard, though.”  
“Oh stop splitting so many hairs, I’m trying to have an argument here and I’m really in the right so stop evading it already.”

Jimmy sniggers as he turns to his side, facing Brian. Brian closes his eyes and sighs and prays to whatever deity he can think of for strength to not up and shove him off the bed.  
“Transparency all around, Jimmy. It’s important.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”  
Well, that was easier than expected. “You mean that?”  
“Of course I do. I really thought it was obvious.”

“I asked you if we were having an affair, you said yes.”  
“I thought you just meant affair, not… _affair_. I already told you before not to worry about Estelle.”  
“’Don’t worry’ doesn’t equal ‘my wife is fine with me blowing you on the side every so often’.”

“I really thought you knew. I’m sorry, Brian. Really. I suppose I forget that most marriages don’t actually work the way mine does.”  
“Now there’s the truth,” Brian grumbles. “I went to see Estelle, you know.”  
“I do know, actually. She said you were like a confused little puppy, which is a cute mental image right there.”

Brian sighs and turns his head to look at Jimmy. He’s so close to him he can’t quite get him in focus. “How will this work, Jimmy? I mean, for real?”  
“I think it’ll work the way it’s been working so far. If that’s what you want. If you’re not okay with this, then it’s… well, you can call it quits, I guess. I won’t – I can’t hold that against you.” 

“I don’t want to call it quits,” Brian mutters, turning his head again. He can’t really look at him when he’s feeling vulnerable like this. “I like this. I like what we have going. I’m just irritated by not really knowing what it was I was involved in. Damn it, Jimmy.”  
“I’m sorry. I can’t say it enough. Can I make it up to you?” He presses a kiss against the side of Brian’s head, into his hair and Brian feels the avalanche of words bubbling up in his throat and doesn’t even try to stop it.

“No. Yes. I don’t know. Fuck, I love you, you know that? I’ve been in this permanent state of being overwhelmed the past few months, and I’m not even fucking gay, and I work with you, and you’re older than me, and you have Tintin hair and math teacher clothes and you’re _married_ and somehow I love you anyway, and I’m really kind of pissed off at you for all of that right now and stop looking at me like that.”

Jimmy is genuinely looking at him like his head is on fire. He wonders if he’s stepped too far, blurting out confessions like this, but it’s already done now anyway so he just keeps going for a little longer. He’s got the chance to speak, he’s damn sure gonna take it.

“I’m really happy with this right now, but I keep thinking about where this would go, what sort of future it would have, but then I think about how you’re supposed to live for the now and the now is pretty damn good. But I mean, what happens if things change? What happens if they don’t? It’s confusing and all I want to do is just hang around with you and maybe watch Elementary later but I keep feeling like I’m avoiding the bigger picture and not sure if that’s going to end well.”  
“Is this a conversation or a monologue? You can just keep talking if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll shut up and listen,” Jimmy says, and Brian has no idea. He turns to look at him again and shrugs.

“I like being with you,” he says miserably, like it’s some awful conclusion to draw. It’s not, it’s genuinely not, but damn it all to hell.  
“I like being with you too,” Jimmy answers, touching their noses together. “And I think we can just do that, and if any bears happen to jump us along the way we’ll fight them as they come.”

“Bears.”  
“Cougars. Wolverines. Whatever metaphor floats your boat.”  
“Naw, bears is fine. Grizzlies. Big ones.”  
Jimmy grins and gives him an open-mouthed kiss, nipping at his lips.

“Bev was talking about what our expectations were and things getting messy,” Brian says, enjoying the way his words cause his lips to catch and drag across Jimmy’s.  
“Bev isn’t in this. I think our expectations overlap well enough. And messy might not be a bad thing, right?” Jimmy’s talking against his chin now, pressing his lips into his stubble, and Brian sighs. His intended argument kind of sizzled out – to be fair, there may not have been much of an argument to _have_.

Yes, things were a little absurd, a little new, a little unusual and probably, yes, more than a little messy.  
But, really, things were fine as they were.

“I do not have Tintin hair, by the way,” Jimmy says, and Brian grins.  
“Yes you do. I half expect a little white Yorkie to pop up around you.”  
“Snowy is a Fox terrier.”

“Would you stop going on random tangents?”  
“You like my random tangents.”  
“I think I _am_ one of your random tangents.”

“Ha! True.” Jimmy rolls on top of him, kissing him in full as he does. Brian opens his legs, allows him to settle in between, and they kiss for a stretching moment. Jimmy tastes familiar, feels familiar, sucks on his tongue and his lips and Brian is endlessly smitten. Jimmy breaks the kiss, drags his mouth across his jaw, and makes a happy little noise into Brian’s neck.

“Hey, Brian?” he says softly.  
“Oh God, what?”  
“I love you too, you hateful bastard.”  
Brian groans, wrapping his arms and legs around Jimmy and keeping him there. “Fuck my life,” he grumbles happily, and Jimmy laughs into his neck.


End file.
